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Dear
Ontario College Students, We have tried. From the beginning of contract negotiations in July
2017, we (faculty, librarians, and counsellors) came to the bargaining table
with integrity, critical thinking, creative solutions, a willingness to engage
in collective problem-solving, a solid commitment to social justice, and a
passion for the betterment of education...many of the same concepts we teach to
you in college education to prepare you as valuable contributors to a just society. The College Employer Council (CEC) has not. From the beginning, the CEC tabled
an unacceptable, concession-laden “Final Offer” that will have devastating
consequences for the college education system – and it was non-negotiable.
Their unwillingness to bargain in good faith forced us to utilize our ability
to strike to get negotiations started, but to no avail. We have tried. We went on strike to stand up for quality education (including
collegial governance) and fair employment in Ontario colleges. We ha…

Taking a look at the numbers and what they tell us about the state of College education.The following article was crafted by Sheridan Faculty, Sean Saunders. You know, I'm a numbers guy. Yes, I'm a math guy, but no, that doesn't automatically make me a numbers guy. In fact, being a pure mathematician at UW, the running joke was none of us could do mental math because we hadn't seen numbers since high school. But that never really applied to me, because I also love numbers. The Pythagoreans said that "all is number"; Plato believed that numbers were the "gateway to the divine"; Erdos and Ramanujan found "extraordinary beauty" in numbers; and a colleague recently said in a talk that "numbers transcend us, yet bind us together." I've always found that numbers told stories. How sad for me, then, to see the stories the numbers are telling in this labour dispute. Let's start off with a few about the College system itself (from the…

With the documented rates of mental health concerns in our students on the rise over the last 5 years, Ontario's college counsellors are increasingly overwhelmed. The Ontario University and College Health Association published a study (1) that look at mental health and wellness Ontario by studying 25,000 college and university students in 2016, the study identified an increase in anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts among post secondary students.(2)

This was subsequently confirmed by the 2017 study by Ryerson Journalism Program and The Star. Academic accommodations due to mental health issues is rising, University of Toronto has documented a 143% since 2009. "At Sheridan College, there have been more than 100 high-risk assessments that involved a call to emergency medical services (EMS) from April 2016 to this February [2017]."(3)

One of the major factors limiting student care and support are the increasing wait times due to growing demand. Often, by the time a st…